Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Does the Peace Corps Really Matter?

John Coyne at the site Peace Corps Worldwide asks, “Does the Peace Corps really matter?” The following is my reply.

Does the Peace Corps matter? I can say it matters to me. I remember in the middle of my second year thinking how meaningful this experience was to me personally. I was really enjoying myself and for one of the first times in my life really felt good about myself and what I was involved in and the people I was involved with. That’s when I decided to extend for a third year. Why leave something after two years when you’re just really getting good at it?

The point is that the Peace Corps is an organization that gives people a chance to make a difference, each person in his or her own way, in a place where what we do actually makes a difference. In a way, the Peace Corps isn’t the people who make it up. It’s really that each person is an individual Peace Corps and this organization is just the umbrella that makes this possible.

The work we do as PCVs does help the countries in which we serve. But there is something else going on as well. It’s the relationships we form among our fellow human beings in other countries that I think make the longest lasting difference. We Americans have our own culture, with all its strengths and weaknesses, just as is true of cultures across the globe.

What the Peace Corps allows, for a very small investment, given the return, is the connection between people of different cultures to learn about and from one another, to grasp our shared humanity, and from the American perspective, to add value in the country in which we work, while broadening our personal understanding of the world and ourselves at the same time.

It’s pretty amazing that we have this organization whose most important result is opening people up to one another. If that isn’t the foundation for peace, I don’t know what is. And in that sense, the Peace Corps is well named, indeed.

If this seems a bit idealistic, well, it’s how I feel, and it reflects my experience of serving three years in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. I think it also captures my son’s experience of spending two years as a PCV in Kazakhstan.